A Washington Post story recounts the plight of Saman Kareem Ahmad, a Kurd who worked as a medal-winning US translator in Iraq for four years, relocated to America and now teaches Arabic to Marines heading to the battle front.

Ahmad applied for his green card, backed up by a sheaf of recommendations from the military, but was turned down as a member of the Kurdish Democratic Party — which Customs and Immigration Services decided qualifies as a terrorist group for trying to overthrow Saddam for years (it’s not officially classed as terrorists, but Immigration has the power to identify “undesignated terrorist groups.”), including anti-Saddam activity during the first and second Gulf War.

Yep, you heard me. Fighting in the same war against the same adversary as the USA has been classified as terrorism.

To add insult to injury, Ahmad’s entire family were wiped out by Saddam’s poison-gas attacks on the Kurds—you know, the ones that have been cited repeatedly over the past eight years as showing why we had to have regime change in Iraq?

At least one other Kurdish translater has been refused a green card on the same grounds.

Pat Buchanan: “First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.”

This is an old argument: African Americans have benefited from their ancestors coming here as slaves. They’d be worse off in Africa. Therefore, slavery is a net positive.

Of course, the same could be said of American Jews: The Eastern European Jews who fled the Holocaust certainly benefited from being here rather than behind the Iron Curtain during the Cold War. Better living standards. Less anti-semitism. You could argue that aside from Israel, this is the best country for Jews to live in.

So by Buchanan’s logic (and that of other conservatives who use the Thank God For Slavery argument), the Holocaust is a net positive, and American Jews should be glad it happened.

Do we see a flaw here?

Obama said he wanted to start a conversation about race. Unfortunately, a lot of the conversation is coming from the mouths of bigots.

Consider, for example, this post from the Instapunk blog about Obama: “You see, you’ve just given life to the suspicion that black people in America are, and have long been, a fifth column — unanimously hating the very country that has afforded the highest standard of living ever achieved by black people in human history. We’re teetering at the edge of believing that you’re a secret society, a massive collection of sleeper cells just waiting for your chance to do serious harm to the rest of us. You’ve made it possible for us to believe that. Because you’re never outraged by what the worst black people do. Because you continue to make excuses for what should be inexcusable to everyone.”

Sleeper cells? Not sharing Instapunks attitude toward African Americans equates to a terrorist network?

And as Glenn Reynolds points out, white candidates aren’t required to express outrage on white behaviour: Nobody requires Bush to specifically say he despises Timothy McVeigh or to offer an opinion on white teens wearing their pants too low, but journalist Tim Russert finds it perfectly logical, apparently, to ask Obama (and in an earlier interview, Colin Powell), to criticize singer Harry Belafonte for making negative comments about Bush (no white interviewees have been asked that question.)

The post also makes an argument that I’ve heard before and always annoys me: “Here’s the dirty secret all of us know and no one will admit to. There ARE [n-word—and yes, he actually used the word]. Black people know it. White people know it.”

If the blogger had said that some black people are obnoxious, annoying, inconsiderate or vile, fair enough: Every category of human beings—white, Catholic, Republican, Democrat, atheist, black, Greek, Baptist—contains obnoxious, annoying, inconsiderate and vile people.

But the n-word isn’t short-hand for “You are not a good human being.” In this kind of discussion, used by a self-confessed “old white guy” it’s an insult and a racist smear (and yes, I’m aware some African Americans use it in conversation, but that doesn’t change my opinion any). While Instapunk says he doesn’t want it in general use, he also applies it not only to public figures he despises—Jeremiah Wright, OJ Simpson—but to teens with baggy pants, spinning rims on their car wheels, listening to rap music.

John Derbyshire of National Review Online,explaining how all white Americans are festering with racial hostility under the skin: “Put me in a room with a white American for a couple of hours and I can work them round to the point where they are telling me about their last mugging, the last time some black DMV clerk insulted them, or whatever. And when you get your white American to that point, the mixture of relief and rage with which it all spills out is like a boil bursting.”

He then goes on to explain that “In observing American racial attitudes and politics, the interest is in the variety of ways white Americans smother their despair. Some, of course, don’t. They are the kind of people whose groups you find on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s ‘hate’ list, though many of them are not noticably hateful, only, as they would put it, ‘realistic.’ Hate is not a synonym for despair.”

“Not noticably hateful?” The SPLC lists the Aryan Nations, neo-Nazi groups, Christian Identity organizations (white supremacist Christian extremists), skinhead groups such as Hammerskin Nation, the KKK, the anti-gay Watchmen on the Walls and more (including black extremists, though those obviously aren’t relevant to Derbyshire’s point). Which ones does he think are the realists, pray tell?

Gov. Charlie Crist admist he smoked pot when younger, but doesn’t believe the laws for nonviolent drug-offenders should be changed because “I don’t want to sacrifice public safety.”

So, does he believe he should have been arrested and given the same kind of sentence drug felons today receive? Would that have been better for public safety?

If he doesn’t believe this, what makes him any different from the people getting busted today?

A couple of articles I read recently—here’s the one I have a link to — say that despite all the furor the recording industry has raised over file sharing, downloads and now YouTube playing music without paying royalties, the artists aren’t seeing a dime.
According to the link above, managers for several artists say their clients haven’t seen a dime out of the YouTube settlements made a year and a half ago. Explanations offered by the industry are that YouTub isn’t generating much money, or it’s slow in paying, but since the record companies refuse to divulge any details of what the royalties are or how the deal is structured, it’s hard to tell.
Another article said the same problem has cropped up with the legal settlements over the various file-sharing programs: The program-makers coughed up money, but it’s not reaching the creators.
Or here’s something that happened last year that took my breath away: The Recording Industry Association of America established that anyone playing digital music, even if it’s on your own personal internet station, has to pay a royalty to RIAA. Of course, if you’re playing your own royalty, you get the money back … but RIAA won’t pay unless you sign up, fork over a fee and join the group first.

•Keith John Sampson, a student and janitor at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis was seen reading a book called “Notre Dame vs. the Klan” — about Notre Dame University’s clash with the antiCatholic KKK — by a black coworker who complained to the school authorities that reading a book about the KKK was a form of racial harassment. Unfortunately, the university sided with the complainant, telling Sampson not to read the book at work again, though officials generously decided not to initiate any punishment.
I could understand the coworker jumping to conclusions and complaining about Sampson, but for the university to agree with the complaint? Unless some hidden dimension comes up to the story, that’s amazingly idiotic.
•Oklahoma State Rep. Sally Kern on homosexuality: “Studies show, no society that has totally embraced homosexuality has lasted for more than, you know, a few decades. . .
I honestly think it’s the biggest threat our nation has, even more so than terrorism or Islam.”
What can one say except no, it isn’t? But bonus stupid points to Kern for identifying Islam, not just terrorism, as a threat to America.

Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia on the show 24 and Jack Bauer’s use of torture: “Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles. … He saved hundreds of thousands of lives …Are you going to convict Jack Bauer?” Scalia subsequently goes on to say how pleased he was with one sequence where Bauer convinces a terrorist that unless he talks, his family will be executed.

This wouldn’t be worthy of discussion if Scalia hadn’t told the BBC last month that he not only thinks torture acceptable when lives are in imminent danger–the “ticking bomb” scenario–but once you accept that, you have to consider it valid to use torture on people for general information (I’ll be discussing this further in Saturday’s column).

Actually, no we don’t. As someone once put it, it’s possible to come up with a situation in which you have to kill a child to save hundreds of lives—let’s say because a terrorist with a nuclear bomb is using the kid as a shield while he presses the detonator. It does not therefore follow that this makes shooting children in other situations (or like Jack Bauer, threatening to shoot them) an alternative that should be considered.

And then we have Homeland Secretary Michael Chertoff saying “I thought that there was one element of the shows that at least I found very thought-provoking, and I suspect, from talking to people, others do as well… I think when people watch the show, it provokes a lot of thinking about what would you do if you were faced with this set of unpalatable alternatives, and what do you do when you make a choice and it turns out to be a mistake … It’s very easy in hindsight to go back after a decision and inspect it and examine why the decision should have been taken in the other direction. But when you are in the middle of the event, as the characters in ‘24′ are, with very imperfect information and with very little time to make a decision, and with the consequences very high on a wrong decision, you have to be willing to make a decision recognizing that there is a risk of mistake.”

In other words, we can’t wait to prove all those enemy combatants are innocent because if they’re guilty and if there’s a bomb out there and if we don’t torture them to find out what they know then something bad might happen so anyone who objects to Bush authorizing the torture of innocent people obviously hates America and loves bin Laden. So there.

I watch 24, I like 24. But I don’t watch it because it makes me think about the ethics and legality of the use of torture in real life, any more than people who watch The Punisher are intrigued by the ethics of when to resort to vigilante justice. I watch it because it’s entertaining and well-made enough and fictional, none of which is the case with real torture. And for all the pretense it confronts us with serious issues about torture, it’s pointedly avoided many of them: Nobody has ever given a false confession to stop the pain or made up information, for instance.

As for the “Would you prosecute Jack Bauer?” question, I think if a CIA agent actually did save LA from a nuclear bomb by the use of torture, no jury in the country would convict him. But Chertoff to the contrary, we’re not dealing with ticking-bomb cases under the current administration, we’re dealing with the Maybe there’s a bomb, Maybe they know something, Maybe the consequences of not torturing will be bad.

That’s not good enough. Not for America.

This weekend, Bush vetoed a bill that would have restricted the CIA to the same interrogation techniques allowed in the Army Field Manual. In other words, banning torture, including techniques such as waterboarding in which water is forced down your throat as if you were drowning (the phrase “simulated drowning” makes it sound much too harmless for my taste).

When the horrible mess that is the Bush presidency is dissected by future historians, I’m sure the Iraq War will be the mistake by which he goes down in history. But history shouldn’t forget that the president of a country that once aspired to be a shining city on a hill has fought to mainstream and legalize torture. Even without the Iraq war, Bush deserves infamy for that.

Tenn. State Senator Doug Henry, on allowing a rape exemption on anti-abortion laws: “Rape, ladies and gentlemen, is not today what rape was. Rape, when I was learning these things, was the violation of a chaste woman, against her will, by some party not her spouse. Today it’s simply, ‘Let’s don’t go forward with this act.’ ”

In other words, if a woman isn’t chaste—however Henry defines chastity—she had it coming. Which was pretty much the attitude back when Henry was “learning these things” which is why successful rape prosecution was so much rarer than it is today.

And if a woman says “don’t go forward” that doesn’t mean it’s against her will if the man doesn’t stop?

Henry subsequently apologized and insisted he wasn’t saying what it appears he’s saying, but it appears he’s saying it.